Cellular wireless communication networks provide nearly ubiquitous connectivity for mobile devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and wireless enabled laptop computers. To provide radio links to mobile devices, cellular network operators build and maintain a large number of cell towers or cell sites. For example, a large wireless network providing national coverage may comprise more than 50,000 cell sites. The quality of cellular communication service provided by cell sites depends on a number of different factors such as the number of subscribers in a coverage area of the cell site, the radio signal strength of the cell site, and the local environment including foliage. Because these factors change over time as seasons change and as population distributions change, it is a challenge for cellular network operators to evaluate the performance of their network and the quality of service provided to their customers.
Typically, in the cellular subscriber troubleshooting paradigm where analyzing the event listing and call trace and looking for various procedures, failures for durations ranging in hours is a primary method of troubleshooting, the network operators are facing a challenge of sifting through the captured event listings which can be quite extensive and separated into hundreds of pages. The navigation through the listing is somewhat “blind” and network operators may need multiple attempts to reach a particular problem area of interest. Various filtering methods or intelligent ways to search data (including, for example, based on procedure/failure/time) to reach areas of interest always come with at least partial loss of data (due to filtering) and loss of continuity of information or result in viewing only a subset of information. It would be advantageous for the network operators to view the events in a chronological order and yet have an ability to reach their problem area of interest in quickest possible ways. Since the problem area of interest varies depending on a particular network operator and also the nature of troubleshooting, providing an ability to define a particular user-defined area of interest and highlighting it during troubleshooting network issues would be useful.